Camping with Bears

November 18, 1999

Camping with Bears

I enjoy an incurable addiction to bears. It is not out of control. I do not spend the grocery money on bears. I am not in bad shape like collectors I hear of who have a thousand bears, each named and on display. The family has never urged me to see a doctor about my problem. I find it difficult to pass a bear, but only bring one home if it calls me back two or three times. Money and space offer constraints that help with self- control. I do not enjoy putting a bear into a box headed for the attic.
Dolls never interested me. I happily assisted my brother in surgery on any doll we found, to see what made it cry or close its eyes. I think there was a short spell when I enjoyed the beautiful clothes my mother made for a Patsy doll. And there was the most beautiful doll in the world, plaster, with blue feathers, that I won at a carnival booth at Virginia Beach when I was 6 or 7 years old. But for enduring affection, given and returned, only bears mattered.

My first bear was dark brown, about 28" tall, stuffed firmly with excelsior. I left him swinging in a hammock at a campground on Casco Bay in Maine, when we packed up and moved on . When I realized this, however many miles on our way, there was no question as to whether or not we should turn back to get him. I was five then, on my first camping trip. My father wanted us to see our country, and couldn't afford hotels, so we camped for two weeks every August. It rains in August wherever you decide to camp. Mother insisted that we take summer and winter clothes on every trip. We sputtered every year, but always needed the heavy coats and learned to take them along, as adults. My father got a charge out of setting up camp, whether in a field (with permission) or in a state park area. He taught us always to leave the campground a little better than we found it, maybe replenishing a wood pile, maybe meticulous cleanup. Almost losing my bear taught me to make a last checkup after the car is loaded and the last tent peg picked up, before I start the engine.

The next bear in memory is being carried into the Edgewater Beach hotel in Chicago, with my teen age brother hissing "Put that thing away!" I did not put the bear away, and started then learning about the pain of adolescent embarrassment ( his, not mine, yet). Camping was apparently much more instructive than staying in a hotel, as no other memory of the hotel remains. As a matter of fact, sibling rivalry evaporated at camp grounds. To get some peace after our in-car bickering, and to set up camp without us underfoot, my father always said, as soon as we were out of the car at a new site, " You kids go find out where the water is and bring some back."
Sixty years later in Branson, Missouri, I was fighting with one of those 10 minute assembly tents of which one side falls down as you raise the other, and I heard myself saying to the last grandson, " Please stop helping and go somewhere for ten minutes while I get this thing up."

My eleventh Christmas was almost a disaster. All I wanted was a new bear. All I saw when I came into the living room was a drop front mahogany desk. I was aware that my parents thought it was wonderful, and they were aware that I was terribly disappointed. My father asked, "Aren't you even going to open the drawers?" So, just to please him I started opening drawers and in the bottom one was a large Stieff box from FAO Schwarz with the bear of my life. I named him C12 H22 O11 ( sugar)but I called him Boufy ( pronounced Boofy). Who can tell why I knew one item from the table of elements, which I did not meet formally for five more years.

Boufy was blond. He traveled the US, went to college, and prospered until the first born inherited him and the great cocker spaniel, Snoozy, found him and joyously spread excelsior over a large area . I didn't really need a new bear while I was raising kids and teaching, but kids leave, and the job ends, and the addiction resurfaces. The bear family now ranges from a very huggable Walmart bear to a chain saw carved black bear from an art gallery in Thermopolis, Wyoming to Webster, the Vermont teddy bear computer nerd who showed up at the party celebrating five years of success directing and teaching computer classes for Senior beginners at our county Senior Center.

I also have a snapshot of a black bear who visited our campsite at Yellowstone Park three nights in a row. The third night I waited for him and got his picture. The car was in dry dock for 10 days so we couldn't use it for food storage. I hung food from trees and fastened the catch on a metal bread box. I left out a sample box of chocolate diet cookies left from the 1962 Denver NEA convention. The bear climbed onto the table, deftly opened the bread box, found nothing good, neatly slit open the cookie package, but wisely left the cookies, and departed when the flash went off. That was the night I thanked my father for the firm rule never, as in NEVER, take food inside the tent. I broke this rule once to escape killer mosquitoes in the Wind River Range in Wyoming, but that night there were only moose around, not bears. The mating call of the moose, on a lonely mountainside, when your car has a flat tire and night falls, is not a reassuring sound, unless you are also a moose.

No recipes are associated with camping memories. I remember the family Hudson with so much space under the hood that my father hung a cast iron kettle over the engine, and stew cooked as we traveled, foreshadowing the crock pot. I remember my son at 8 or 9, on his first camping trip, sitting at a wet table with rain dripping from his oilskin hat into his canned tomato soup, saying, "This is wonderful." I remember the first grandson at 4 or so, on his first camping trip. I had been warned by his parents that he was a very poor eater. On the first day out, after his second hot dog, he said , "Grandma, you don't cook so good in the house, but outside you sure cook great."